All of my regular table were able to make it for the eleventh session of Scourge of the Sword Coast. We only had one other table this week, but it had seven players and one DM. Personally, I would have preferred to split it into two tables, but we were missing both our regular third DM and our back-up DM, so Ben did a good job of running the crowd. Thankfully, D&D Next is fairly forgiving of larger numbers in a way that 3E and 4E weren’t.

My own table were continuing through Firehammer Hold this week. We’d paused play from the last session after the group had fended off an attack by several duergar warriors. After catching their breaths, the group began to wonder where to go next. Troy had a look down the passageway the duergar had been coming from, and saw that further duergar had arrived and seemed to be discussing what to do next.

My group did try to negotiate with the duergar, but quickly came to an impasse: the duergar didn’t want to release their prisoners, and the heroes didn’t want to leave! Tait provoked the combat by sneak attacking a duergar with his bow, but was unable to get back into cover in time and fell to the duergar priests casting hold person spells on him. The group moved to defend him, and he was dragged back into the feasting chamber, where he was fed several potions of healing and received a cure wounds spell from Sondra. The duergar priests and their guardian warriors fought hard, and inflict wounds spells inflicted a fair amount of damage on the party.

The group wanted information, and they were constantly reminding each other that they needed to capture one of the duergar. They were finally able to knock one out, but the last of the priests escaped. Lily attempted to create the illusion of a wall of fire to stop his escape, but he made his saving throw and ran right through it, proceeding down a set of stairs. No-one was eager to follow.

Instead, they woke the captured duergar and questioned him about the prisoners and who was guarding them. I found it amusing that when he was telling the truth, no-one believed him, so he just began to lie, telling them what they wanted to hear.

The prisoners were being kept in the mine (being worked as miners) and they had between 3 and 20 guards. With no more use for him, the group killed the prisoner, only then realising that they hadn’t actually asked directions to get to the mine!

However, it isn’t like there were all that many ways to go, and so the group proceeded down the stairs the priest had run down and came to the more rough formations of the Firehammer mine.

They were greeted by the sight of a statue of Haela Brightaxe, over which a strange helmet had been placed, but none of the party could identify its provenance. They removed the helmet and cleaned the statue a bit before proceeding onwards. Ignoring the set of stairs proceeding further down, they made their way along a tunnel to a great cavern, a pool on its south side and with several tunnels proceeding outwards. Listening carefully, the group could hear movement from one of the tunnels and gravelly duergar voices.

The group started to ambush the duergar, only to be surprised in turn with some spider-riding duergar from another cavern! Soon, Troy found himself standing along against the riders, whilst duergar rushed into the cavern and felled Tait where he was hiding behind a large rock. The rest of the group cast spells and fired missiles to aid their companions.

(I found I hadn’t brought in spiders for the duergar riders, so used grick miniatures instead).

Josh charged in to aid Troy, and between them they were able to slay the riders and one of the spiders. Josh jumped onto the other spider, attempting to tame it. Like Danielle a couple of months ago, he was successful, rolling really well and rode the Steeder into battle against the remaining duergar. It was a tough battle, and a long one, and at its end the party discovered that the duergar had been guarding the prisoners… the villagers from Julkoun had been saved!

Dealing with that would have to wait for next week, as we were (once again) out of time. We’d played for about 90 minutes or so, with two big combats and the interrogation taking up most of the time.

I’m amazed we haven’t finished Firehammer Hold yet, but there is a lot of material in this adventure – and we won’t get to run all of it before Dead in Thay begins in a very short period of time.